Language, consciousness and culture: some suggestions to develop further the Moscow school of psycholinguistics

The Moscow school of psycholinguistics offers an applied, Neo-Humboldtian and Vygotskyian approach to the problem of how language consolidates the cognitive and cultural experience of a community. The Moscow school of psycholinguistics places a great emphasis on culture as a source of conceptualizing experience through cognitive structures such as word associations. It uses natural language semantics as a cognitive approach to meaning and shows how cognition is structured. Traditionally, the Moscow school has perceived the problem of intercultural communication to lie in the systemic and symbolic association of words which are inherent in the local culture. Over the last few decades, Russian psycholinguists have tried to tease apart what they understand to be the cultural specificity of language consciousness by analysing cross-linguistic data from free association experiments. The ultimate objective with this research is to map cross-cultural ontologies with a view to facilitating intercultural communication, but also as a means of appreciating more fully other cultures. With the ongoing trend of globalisation, cultural fluidity and the beckoning opportunities that Big Data analytics will surely provide, it is perhaps time to pause to reconsider future avenues of research within the exciting research paradigm of cultural semantics. It is also an opportunity to reconfigure some of the terminology such as linguistic 'worldview' which should be understood not as a fixed conception of the world which envelops the thinking subject, but more as a continually evolving 'cultural mindset' that articulates different perceptions of the world. As more linguists question generative theories of language, interest in cultural semantics is expected to accelerate and might embrace the semantic association tools that the Moscow school has developed. This article makes a few tentative suggestions as to how the Moscow school could refashion the renewed interest in cultural lexical associations and its related findings on pragmatically conditioned meanings. By engaging with ethnographic data, speech acts and by developing more of an ethnopragmatic approach that examines the diversity of speech practices and shows how both syntax and morphology encode grammar, the Moscow school should be well positioned to continue to reap the dividends of the recent interest in the language culture interface. As ethnography begins to team up with the use of digital data and Smartphone dictionary apps., our resources should become at some point in the future far more comprehensive than they ever have been before. Attempts to disentangle the language, culture, consciousness nexus from lexical associations based on Big Data analytics might be one of the beneficiaries of these developments.

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